| In a traditional model the Distributor is the means by
which to hold to
account the use of the copyrighted material by the Media. For existing Distributors this is a three-sided question - (concentrating on the video side of things for the moment) in-house content/the playout of third party content/the transmission of live events(sports, concerts, etc.). When it comes to in-house content then all is fair in love and war. To playout third party content then they either DOG (Digital Onscreen Graphic) all channels or splash some on-screen graphic during the transmission to indicate where it was sourced. With live events they will have to DOG all output and also negotiate rights to all media platforms. The reason the Distributor needs to control it's content is that I, as a Consumer, have "bought" the content and am happy to continue to do so as long as all others are equally as eager. This starts to be undermined though when I can get all my movies, TV series, documentaries, etc online. I can download them to my Network Attached Storage box, pipe them through to my Mediaplayer and watch them on my LCD. I build my own channel and watch the content when I want. Now if there is no indication as to where this content was sourced from then I have no reason to believe I need to pay, as I have no connection to the company that produced it in the first place and I have paid my ISP for the bandwidth to access this content. This is happening everyday, and more and more people genuinely believe they do not need to pay if they are not watching TV in "realtime". As with Live events we had a classic example with Live8, where the BBC broadcast it but it was available online from AOL. How much does that make you want to pay a Licence Fee? Currently you can download broadcast quality versions of any film or TV episode your heart desires if you know where to look. We may not want DRM but you can be damn sure the commercial players do and my adage would be to "retaliate first". If you wait to have one imposed on you then you are at the mercy of the commercial company that produced it. They become the gatekeepers to your content. If the BBC develops an open-standard, cross-platform solution then they not only do a massive service to the media industry (this includes the print media!), they also ensure the licence fee payer doesn't get screwed either. A very public service. Could we not trust licence fee payers to access and even play around with our content without DRM? Absolutely - but the problem is it then gets out in the wild to non licence fee payers. Why should I pay for everyone in the world to watch BBC programmes I have paid for? I would be happy to do this if it meant I could equally access global content for the same BBC fee i.e. there were reciprocal arrangements with other national broadcasters but I think that may be unlikely/unenforceable. As long as they do not commercially exploit it then there's no problem? I agree 100%. If they do try and make money out of it we set a lawyer on them? Uploading content on to the Internet that is clean (i.e. no way to tie it back to the originator/uploader) makes it impossible to determine who to "lawyer" - so you go after the sites that host/index content. Not the best tactic as it's like fighting the Hydra. This is the model we have used for BBC backstage and I think for the Creative Archive? I sincerely hope that this will work as a model but it does get undermined as I say by the concept of me being able to create my own content channel from downloads other than the BBC. CA was taking about using the Creative Commons licence so not sure about that. In Building Public Value we said we were against encryption. Isn't DRM a form of encryption? It doesn't have to be - you can create a DRM model that doesn't encrypt but is capable of uniquely identifying the originator/uploader. If you want a more detailed explanation of that model drop me a line and I'll give you a brief description. |
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